Mar 11th

Online, you will find a lot of tips, guides and suggestions on how to make your content go viral. The truth is that there is no method that works 100 percent of the time. On the other hand, you don’t need to become an internet sensation in order to boost your brand image or slightly improve your sales. All you need is to learn how to engage your audience a bit more efficiently. This, however, is not nearly as complex as you might have assumed. Therefore, here are five tips for engaging your audience on social media.

1. Headline patterns

Have you ever noticed how so many online titles follow the same pattern? Well, there’s a method to this madness. You see, most of these patterns have an important psychological foundation to back them up. For instance, the use of numbers is always a great idea, yet, it was proven that going with odd numbers (3, 5 or 7) tends to be more appealing to the online audience. Then again, you can never go wrong with a top 10 or 20 list either.

Apart from this,the use of proper adjectives and superlatives is also quite efficient. The greatest problem people have with choosing the right superlative is the question of whether they should go with positive or negative. According to numerous studies, it was proven that the use of negative superlative (worst, never, etc.) has a much stronger impact when it comes to your engagement efforts.

2. The choice of hashtags

One of the best things about social media is the phenomenon of hashtags. Needless to say, the way these hashtags work is that they allow you to categorize your content effortlessly, even on platforms that don’t necessarily work with these categories (like Pinterest does). As for the issue of identifying adequate hashtags, it has a lot of similarity with the idea of identifying the keyword. Still, in order for this to work, you need the right media intelligence platform. In this way, you can conduct extensive research on your competitors and discover which hashtags tend to resound the strongest with their target demographic.

3. Use videos

When it comes to your content, you need to keep in mind that the format you present it in can be crucial to your overall engagement rate. Namely, visual information is much easier to register than verbal. This is both due to human nature (90 percent of all information we get from the outside world is visual) and due to mobile-friendliness of video format. Apart from this, you need to keep in mind that 82 percent of all Twitter users watch video on that particular platform, while Facebook users watch over 100 million hours of video content every single day. These two stats alone should be enough to show you just how potent this medium can be when handled properly.

4. Contest or giveaway

The way marketing works is that you need to offer something of value to your audience and in return, you get their attention, interest and even loyalty. Some generate this through informative or entertaining content, while others choose a path with less subterfuge and outright start rewarding their audience for loyalty. The most common form of this on social media are contests or giveaways. Even though the hope of personal gain may be a strong motivator capable of doing most of the work for you, this project still needs strong PR coverage in order to yield optimal results.

5. Use the right time

Believe it or not, the time when you post your content can be as important as the content itself. Here, however, you will find that different social networks have different rules. On Facebook, for instance, the rule is that Saturday and Sunday have the highest average engagement rate, followed closely by Thursday and Friday. On the other hand, when it comes to Twitter, there is a much greater discrepancy between B2B (which performs best in the middle of the week during business hours) and B2C engagement (that is the most efficient during the weekend). One more thing, when scheduling your posts, take into consideration that your audience might be in a different time zone.

Conclusion

The most important thing you need to keep in mind is that making your content or your content marketing strategy more engaging doesn’t require that much effort. Knowing when to post, how to pick the right format and which hashtags to choose isn’t something that requires hours of research or preparation. In most cases, this is something that can be unveiled at a minute’s notice and immensely boost your average engagement rate.

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-Keith O'Sullivan